In broad strokes, one might divide philosophers into two camps. Some set out to undermine a distinction. When we set down their works we can no longer see any difference between racism and speciesism, between analytic truths like “all bachelors are unmarried” and synthetic ones like “the cat is on the mat.” Others want to introduce new distinctions. Descartes teaches us to see two flavors of substance: minds and bodies, representing stuff and represented stuff. Kant discourages us from confusing the empirical with the transcendental. In Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame Harvard philosopher T. M. Scanlon is up to a task of the second sort. He forges a convincing distinction between an action’s permissibility and its meaning.

Consider an action that aims at the death of an innocent person: is it always wrong? Many believe that a tactical bombing campaign that targets military bases but entails the loss of civilian lives is legitimate. On the other hand, an attack that aims at the deaths of civilians, in the hopes of demoralizing the populace, is wrong. This intuition is often explained as follows: the difference between a tactical airstrike and a massacre is that in the latter case, the deaths of civilians are explicitly intended. Scanlon begins by challenging this basic intuition. He shows cases in which this seemingly commonsensical distinction becomes absurd:

Suppose you were a prime minister and the commander of the air force described to you a planned air raid that would be expected to destroy a munitions plant and also kill a certain number of civilians, thereby probably undermining public support for the war. If he asked whether you thought this was morally permissible you would not say “Well that depends on what your intentions would be in carrying it out. Would it be intending to kill the civilians or would their deaths be merely an unintended but foreseeable (albeit beneficial) side effect of the destruction of the plant?

And yet we do continue to think there is an important difference between tactical bombing and terror bombing, and, more specifically, that terror bombing is worse than tactical bombing because it aims at the deaths of innocent persons. How can we explain the appeal of this intuition?

Scanlon argues that mistaken intuitions about the relevance of intent to permissibility arise from the confusion of two subtly different forms of moral assessment: assessment of the permissibility of an action and assessment of the way an agent decided what to do. It is true that an agent who intends to massacre civilians to bring an end to the war has done something wrong and it is also true that she has an intention she should abandon. But where we go wrong is in thinking that the odiousness of her intention is what makes her action impermissible. The act is wrongful because it will result in a morally unacceptable consequence — a harm disproportionate to the benefit it is supposed to bring about.

Through such carefully staged examples, Scanlon introduces a distinction between an action’s meaning and its permissibility. In broadest terms, this distinction hinges on the distinction we can make between the single, episodic effect of a given action — which determines whether it is permissible or not — and the degree to which this action makes us change our social behavior towards that person — what we think this action means about the agent’s character or attitudes.

Imagine that you have promised to attend a friend’s wedding but your doctor forbids you to go because of your ill health. This development discharges you from your obligation to make the trip. But suppose you decide to disobey the doctor and go to the wedding, but reverse your decision upon learning that your favorite pop-star will be visiting your town to sign autographs during the week of the wedding. On Scanlon’s view the fact that your motivation has changed has no bearing on the permissibility of your action — your ill health discharges you from any obligation to attend, you cannot be offended at the effect of his decision to stay at home. But an assessment of the meaning of this action, of the way in which your friend will relate to you after the incident, will examine carefully the fact that getting an autograph means more to you than your friend’s wedding. It does depend on your reasons for acting.

Intent is thus not typically relevant to permissibility, but it determines an action’s meaning, its social resonance. This makes it an important factor in the assignment of blame. Blame is, for Scanlon, no mere moral grading. Nor is it some kind of sanction imposed upon the blameworthy party. To blame someone, on his view, is to understand one’s relations with that person to be impaired in some way. This is true even when we are blaming ourselves. Scanlon writes, paradoxically, that a person who blames herself has decided that she can no longer be her own friend. Blame need not presuppose that the blameworthy agent freely chose her fate. It defines the social stance we take towards a given person, but not the degree to which we attribute to this person the full responsibility for the fact that they are doing something impermissible. In one of the most memorable sections of the book, Scanlon uses this framework to reconsider the so-called “Cosby controversy” of 2004. Cosby’s criticism to the effect that poor blacks had made bad choices was taken by liberals and conservatives alike to imply that fault rests with poor blacks alone. On Scanlon’s view, Cosby’s opinion need not be as condemnable. We can blame people without also committing ourselves to the view that they were completely responsible for their fate; it may be true that poor blacks have behaved badly, and also, that their behavior is attributable to societal factors beyond their control. 

This conclusion is potentially interesting not only for metaphysicians, but also for those interested in the moral significance of social ills. Scanlon observes that conservatives are often unwilling to regard urban crime, teenage pregnancy, and drug abuse as the products of social conditions because they believe that this would somehow exonerate people who behave badly. Liberals are reluctant to blame the poor for abusing drugs or dropping out of school because they assume that doing so discharges society of any obligation it may have to its victims. But both of these views result from a failure to distinguish the question of whether or not a person can be blamed for her actions, and whether or not the person is responsible for her fate. As Scanlon argues, “a problem can, at the same time, be both grounds for moral criticism of individuals and something that calls for social action.” Scanlon argues that the distinction he makes can thus be used better to understand the seemingly contradictory intuitions we have about how to deal with matters such as these.

The painting reproduced on the book jacket for Moral Dimensions is one of El Lissitzky’s Prounen, which employ abstract geometrical forms. Gray chords cut across a black circle perched precariously on a brown parallelogram. Like El Lissitzky, Scanlon was initially interested in mathematics. And like the Lissitzky Proun, Scanlon’s writing is highly abstract, yet elegant and rational. Rawls observes in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, “Perhaps the best philosophical style is clear and lucid aiming to present the thought itself, without side effects yet with a certain grace and formal beauty of line.” This description aptly characterizes the calm architectonic perfection of Scanlon’s prose.

In Plato’s Republic, the bold warrior Thrasymachus challenges Socrates to define justice. Socrates flounders and implores his interlocutors to aid him in the construction of a “city in speech” — an ideal realm in which justice reigns. Philosophers throughout history have sought morality in vividly imagined otherworldly realms. If you read T.M. Scanlon’s Moral Dimensions through this tradition, it might strike you as a little provincial. And, cosmically speaking, it is. It is an inquiry that concerns itself less with the sorts of truths that fall from the heavens, and more with those that already subtly inform our ways of acting, judging and thinking. This is why Scanlon’s conclusions are both startling and uncannily familiar. It is comforting to know that, with a little finesse, most of our gut intuitions about difficult cases can be rendered consistent with one another and integrated into something resembling a general theory. In this sense, it certainly beats Plato’s approach. In Plato, Polemarchus, who cautiously suggests that justice is helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies, is soundly refuted. He does not muster the courage to speak again.

Jacob McNulty ’11 is permissible, but its meaning could figure in an assessment of blame.